Vivyan Adair This year I was honored by being named The New York State Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Institute. The year before, in addition to earning tenure and being awarded an endowed chair at Hamilton College, I was voted “Alumni of the Year” by my alma mater. Everyday I have the privilege of teaching, learning, lecturing and writing about things that I care deeply about and working with colleagues and students who I respect and admire. While I work diligently, my nineteen year old daughter is living in Mexico as an International Rotary Scholar; in the fall of 2005 she will attend Smith College as an honor student. Our lives are rich and productive and we are blessed and rewarded beyond our greatest expectation.
These rewards are the result of a journey of transformation that my daughter and I embarked on in the summer of 1986. At that time I enrolled in a community college as a welfare recipient and single parent without the skills, knowledge, credentials, self-esteem or vision necessary to support and nurture my family. In college I was challenged by able and patient instructors who encouraged me to positively transform my life through the pathway of higher education. My passage was guided by those teachers whose classrooms became places where I was able to build bridges between my own knowledge of the world and crucial new knowledge, skills and methodologies. Dedicated faculty created exciting, interactive exercises and orchestrated intensely challenging discussions that enabled me to embrace a vast range of knowledge and to use my newfound skills to re-envision my gifts, strengths, and responsibilities to the world around me. Little by little the larger social, creative, political and material world exposed itself to me in ways that were resonant and urgent, inviting me to analyze, negotiate, articulate and reframe systems, histories, and pathways that had previously seemed inaccessible. The process was invigorating, restorative, and life altering.
Students in the ACCESS project, which I developed and now direct, experience just such an inviting, unfolding and regenerative process. As a result of exposure to liberal arts education they learn to make connections between their own knowledge of the world and the theories, analysis and history of others. In the process they begin to alter not just the surface skills and knowledge they hold, but the way they think, problem solve, communicate, work, lead other and value themselves, becoming increasingly able, educated and engaged thinkers and citizens in the fullest sense of the terms. Through the acquisition of new knowledge and methods, students increasingly make connections between education and civic engagement, authority and responsibility, reaching their own fullest potential as individuals and life time learners, and beginning to think clearly about and work for the betterment of their families and culture as a whole. These journeys fulfill the promise of a truly free nation and represent the power and potential of higher education in the United States at its very best.
